Microbial Fuel Cells Applied to the Metabolically-Based Detection of Extraterrestrial Life

Abstract

Since the 1970's, when the Viking spacecrafts carried out experiments aimed to the detection of microbial metabolism on the surface of Mars, the search for nonspecific methods to detect life in situ has been one of the goals of astrobiology. It is usually required that the methodology can detect life independently from its composition or form, and that the chosen biological signature points to a feature common to all living systems, as the presence of metabolism. In this paper we evaluate the use of Microbial Fuel Cells (MFCs) for the detection of microbial life in situ. MFCs are electrochemical devices originally developed as power electrical sources, and can be described as fuel cells in which the anode is submerged in a medium that contains microorganisms. These microorganisms, as part of their metabolic process, oxidize organic material releasing electrons that contribute to the electric current, which is therefore proportional to metabolic and other redox processes. We show that power and current density values measured in MFCs using microorganism cultures or soil samples in the anode are much larger than those obtained using a medium free of microorganisms or sterilized soil samples, respectively. In particular, we found that this is true for extremophiles, usually proposed to live in extraterrestrial environments. Therefore, our results show that MFCs have the potential to be used to detect microbial life in situ.